Roald Dahl and the giant trove

For years the yellowing papers and dog-eared notebooks lay untouched in the rather grubby garden shed where Roald Dahl dreamt up his fantastical children's stories.

But now, for the first time, Dahl's drafts, jottings and letters are being sorted and catalogued, giving fascinating glimpses of the genesis of some of his most popular characters and a fresh insight into the author's mind.

Among the details that may take Dahl aficionados aback is the revelation that the author first imagined the hero of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as a black boy, and the piece of fruit in James and the Giant Peach as a huge cherry.

It has also emerged that Matilda died at the end of an early version of her story rather than living happily ever after, while only at a late stage was the child in The BFG (Big Friendly Giant) named after Dahl's granddaughter, the model Sophie.

To the surprise of those friends who thought Dahl cavalier about his writing, the paperwork also reveals that he was fastidious, repeatedly reworking his ideas and concerned about every minute detail of the books.");document.write("

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After Dahl died in 1990 his family and friends were reluctant to set foot in the hut at the bottom of the garden, which had been his very private den.

But the family has decided that the Dahl archive ought to be a centrepiece of a new centre to be opened next year in the Buckinghamshire village of Great Missenden, where Dahl lived.

The £4 million ($10 million) centre, which is expected to attract 40,000 visitors a year, will tell Dahl's life story and include classrooms, reading rooms and interactive displays designed to encourage children and adults to read and write.

The documents, full of spelling mistakes, crossings out and Dahl's scrawly handwriting, have been moved from the shed - which will be replicated in the centre - into the writer's old snooker room, where they are being read and preserved for posterity.

There have been many surprises, not least the early drafts of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In a draft thought to have been written about 1961, six years before it was published in Britain, the story had the politically incorrect title, given the hero's colour, of Charlie's Chocolate Boy.

During the tour of Willy Wonka's amazing factory, he becomes covered head to foot in chocolate. Charlie is taken to Wonka's house as a present for his son. He witnesses a burglary and is rewarded with a gift of a sweet shop.

By the third version the story was much closer to the published version, probably the seventh draft, in which all the children except Charlie, by now a white boy, meet sticky ends.